Huawei has made a super-affordable fitness tracker that ticks all the boxes for keeping an eye on all the important stuff when you’re exercising and makes a for a pretty decent sleep tracker (I think) but just don’t expect much more from it than that.
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Build
The Huawei Band 6 is not a premium product by any stretch of the imagination. Usually available at around £40, or £30 if you can get it on sale, it aims to fit neatly into the budget fitness tracker target market. For this reason you won’t be seeing build material such as aircraft grade aluminium or intricately crafted rubber bands. The casing is a grey plastic and the band is a plain black rubber. Not to say that it feels cheap however, as I from all of my time wearing the band it’s always felt sturdy and has even survived the odd drop or bash off a countertop. It’s also water resistant and can be worn when swimming but I wouldn’t expect Huawei to cover water damage under warranty. The rubber doesn’t get particularly sweaty and it doesn’t get too uncomfortable after wearing for long periods of time although sometimes I do feel the need to loosen it a bit to air out my wrist.
Running
I received the Huawei Band 6 as a birthday present as I wanted something to use for keeping an eye on my sleep quality and also to track the likes of heart rate and overall activity when exercising. Initially I had been keen on getting into running for which the Huawei Band would have been perfect however after realising that losing weight was something I wasn’t looking to do and would much rather become bigger and stronger I instead focused on going to the gym and lifting regularly.
The few times that I used the Huawei Band for tracking running I have to say were pretty flawless. It really is where it excels. As soon as you start a run or a walk, with options available for both indoor and outdoor varieties, the band displays an easily glanceable overview of various stats about your run such as pace, heart rate, time, training stress zone. It also provides another display when you swipe across to control media. This is also extremely useful as pressing volume buttons on a phone in your pocket or squashing a wireless earbud into your ear while running is less than ideal.
The band itself doesn’t allow for media playback or even GPS for that matter, so all of your exercising will require having your phone with you in some way. This isn’t particularly annoying as I expect most people would feel naked without their phone with them in this day and age anyways . My only issue with this feature omission is the implementation of GPS when starting a run or walk. For the location of your run to be tracked properly, the workout must be started from the Huawei Health app rather than from the band itself. This is a minor inconvenience especially if you’re raring to go and then realise that you need to dig your phone back out just to track your run. I believe this shouldn’t be an issue for those of you using Huawei devices however as the issue seems to be a limitation of Android rather than the band itself, which Huawei appears to have made a workaround for on their own devices.
Strength Training
So clearly for running and other exercise that is tracked in a similar manner, the Huawei Band 6 ticks the right boxes. For other exercise, it’s not quite so perfect. To be fair to the band, there’s not really a whole lot that can be measured when lifting weights. As far as I know there’s not a fitness band out there that cant count reps and sets or log how much weight your lifting so I’m not surprised that the Huawei Band hasn’t magically created such an advanced feature set.
The band does feature tracking for “Strength”, which I would assume covers everything lifting related. It also offers a “Core” training tracker, although how these differ in terms of measurements I’m not entirely sure.
Sleep Tracking
One other area that I think the Huawei band really nails is sleep tracking. Now obviously sleep tracking is fairly tough to verify accuracy. For me, sleep tracking has been extremely important as I’m extremely prone to sleep talking and walking, especially when under significant stress. So having a way to determine how well I’ve slept and whether certain factors may affect the quality of my sleep has been of significant interest to me to ensure that I’m not causing these conditions to become worse. Previously I had been making use of the “Sleep as Android” app to track my sleep using the accelerometer on my phone. I now use a combination of both Sleep as Android and the Huawei Band to track my sleep and find that they complement each other well. Although Sleep as Android does not provide support for the Huawei Band as it does with other fitness trackers like the Xiaomi line-up of fitness bands, Huawei’s app provides enough data about sleep quality for it to be useful and combined with Sleep as Android’s sleep noise recording I feel like I’m getting as good of an insight as I can without buying medical grade equipment.
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